Nuns Thrown Under the Bus

Last year, Entertainment Weekly magazine honored the arrival of a viciously anti-Catholic tilt on the FX show "American Horror Story: Asylum" by promoting how actress "Jessica Lange returns, this time as a terrifying nun."

Bigotry sells — big — in Tinseltown. This year, after that "Asylum" season aired, Hollywood has honored the show again by showering it with 17 Emmy nominations. There's a reason Hollywood revels in Catholic-bashing. The Catholic Church best represents for them an ancient organization with a creed, which refuses to genuflect before the modern god of La La Land: untrammeled whims of lust and greed.

Ryan Murphy, the gay-activist "genius" behind "Horror Story" and Fox's "Glee," proclaimed, "I'm just writing what I would like to see. I'm scared of aliens, and I'm scared of Nazis, and I'm scared of nuns. So it's the perfect stew of horror and fear." Does that comment make this man controversial? Not at all. Murphy was "mainstream" enough to host a $25,000-a-head Democratic fundraiser at his home in June of 2012 starring that staunch Christian, Barack Obama.

Murphy's warped psyche created a mental asylum named Briarcliff and put Lange's perverted and deranged character, "Sister Jude," in charge of the lunatics. The vomit came spewing from the first episode on Oct. 17, with a fantasy sequence where Sister Jude fantasized about stripping to a small red nightie and straddling Monsignor Howard, the priest assigned to the asylum, as they gazed into each other's eyes longingly.

In episode two, a nymphomaniac patient named Shelley taunted a psychiatrist: "I saw you flirting with Our Lady of Perpetual Virginity. Want to see my candy apple?" Later, the psychiatrist hired a prostitute who dressed up in a nun's habit. In an attempted exorcism, a demon-possessed man declared that Lange's Sister Jude had performed oral sex on 53 men before becoming a nun. "You were the town pump, weren't you, Sister?"

In episode three, the young nun Sister Mary Eunice became possessed by a demon, so she could have all the Catholic-taunting fun: "Your little bride of Christ has had an awakening, not to the Lord, but to the power of sex, lust, desire."

Later in the episode, a psychiatrist shattered a statue of the Virgin Mary as he yelled, "Whore, whore, whore!"

When the Catholic League tried to protest the show before it aired with full-page advertisements in the trade publications Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, they were spurned, and told their ad was — ready? — "inappropriate."

Not one character in "Asylum" is a hero. No one has a moral core. In the sixth episode, Monsignor Howard strangled a patient to death with a rosary — after giving her last rites. In the seventh show, demonic Sister Mary Eunice slit a man's throat with a piece of a shattered mirror. Sister Jude was shown slashing her own wrists — but that turned out to be yet another fantasy sequence. In the ninth episode, Sister Mary Eunice raped the monsignor, taking his virginity. All these consecrated characters eventually end up dead by murder, suicide or happily welcoming the "angel of death."

Perhaps the ugliest hour was "Unholy Night," the Christmas-themed episode on Dec. 5. Murphy explained that "American Horror Story" and Christmas don't go together, so he created a "homicidal Santa" character. This "Santa" was then thrown into the asylum, where he propositioned a fellow inmate: "What do you say we blow this Popsicle stand? Go savage a few elves and suck on each other?" When he was released from his chains, "Santa" threatened the nun in charge with rape, pledging to fulfill his fantasies and "jam this gigantic crucifix" up her rear end.

This is the kind of reception this hate-crime of a series gets from TV critics, if you can call them that. Matt Fowler of the IGN website for video gamers called the Santa episode "just good, sick fun," adding, "It seems a bit slight to call this episode a fun romp, seeing as how bloody and unhinged it was, but watching McShane (Santa) chew up the set and slash at people with glass tree-toppers was just gruesome enough to make me giddy."

Advertisers never stayed away. Lots of R-rated movies and M-rated video games were promoted to this audience. But advertisers also included Taco Bell, Subway, Burger King and the movies "Lincoln," "Frankenweenie" and "Wreck-It Ralph."

The most ridiculously out-of-place advertiser? ChristianMingle.com. It recalls the Bible verse, "Jesus wept."

In today's America, our leaders don't feed traditional Christians to the lions. Instead, our media elites persecute them by trashing everything they revere as the worst kind of terrifying, oppressive and hypocritical dung.

This is demented.

And it has been nominated for 17 Emmys.

L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. To find out more about Brent Bozell III, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.